Chelsea had two new debutants in their starting team on Saturday, plus returning loanees and new faces on the bench.
Yet it wasn’t long into the game before we were seeing the exact same things we were seeing last season.
This formation, as favoured by Thomas Tuchel, gives us a solid base, but there’s so often desperately little going forward. That’s especially true when Ben Chilwell and Reece James aren’t scoring goals or getting assists (in the end, the win came down to Chilwell’s burst into the box being stopped illegally).
There’s still plenty of time and training sessions to get things going again, and we may even see more attacking players added. But it was amazing to see the enthusiasm for a new season evaporate so quickly as the team retreated to their old habits, despite an unprecedented 6 months of change at the club.
We’re not sure how many 1-0 (Jorginho penalty) wins we can handle.
